Alex Walthers, an old-time longshoreman who spoke at the funeral services for the victims of Bloody Thursday in 1934, recalled the 1919 longshoremen's strike. "I took part in the 1919 strike, and we were holding out very well, and then our strike committee prevailed upon the membership to make an additional demand. That is to demand that the union be given representation on the employer board. Trying to get union men on their board. That helped to break us up," 9 he said. Twenty-one years later, Thomas Plant remembered, horror underlying his words, two of the demands made in 1919: "25 percent stock ownership in each of the steamship companies, together with a number of seats on the boards of directors."

These startling demands emerged from a background of turbulence that marked the end of both World War I and the wartime truce between workers and their employers. Talk of nationalization flourished, with the railroads and coal mines prime candidates. Attacks on radicals, real and imagined, spread. Prices climbed, unrest mounted, strikes broke out. Union-open shop feuds stilled by wartime conditions were revived.